From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1960 to 1970 Timeline

Reflecting the obsolescence of mathematical tables as a result of the development of electronic computing,  Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the first computing journal, changes its name to Mathematics of Computation.

John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneers computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they can be searched and retrieved by “key words in combination” (KWIC).

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Defense Department increases funding for research on computing.

IBM introduces a transistorized version of its vacuum-tube-logic 709 computer, the 7090.

The 7090 was the first commercially available general purpose computer with transistor logic. It became the most popular large computer of the early 1960s.

Lanston Monotype Machine Company introduces the Monomatic composing machine, a system perpetuating the concept of a separate keyboard and caster interfaced by a 31-channel punched paper tape.

“The keyboard consisted of a two-alphabet layout (instead of the customary five or seven) augmented by four shift keys. In the caster, the matrix-case contained 324 characters arranged in 18 ¥ 18 rows. There were no restrictions on unit values within the rows.”

William A. Fetter, a researcher at Boeing, coins the term “computer graphics.”

About six thousand computers are operational in the United States, and perhaps ten thousand are operational worldwide.

Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage, and electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch, report the success of the world’s first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a self-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper entitled A Transistorized, Self-contained, Implantable Pacemaker for the Long-term Correction of Complete Heart Block.

The U.S. Navy launches NAVSAT, also known as TRANSIT.

NAVSAT was the first operational satellite navigation system. Using a constellation of five satellites, the system was primarily used to obtain accurate location information by ballistic missile submarines, and was also used as a general navigation system by the Navy, and in hydrographic and geodetic surveying. Since there was no computer small enough to fit through a submarine’s hatch, a new computer was designed, named the AN/UYK-1. It was built with rounded corners to fit through the hatch, was about five feet tall, and sealed to be water-proof.

John McCarthy introduces LISP (LISt Processor), the language of choice for artificial intelligence (AI) programming.

PLATO I (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first electronic learning system, developed by Donald Bitzer, operates on the ILLIAC 1 at the University of Illinois.

Plato I included a television for a display and a special system to navigate the system's menu. It serviced a single user. In 1961 PLATO II allowed two students to operate the system at one time.

Widely considered the first software patent, "Prater-Wei" was about calculating temperatures for petroleum fractionation.  This patent, originally filed by Mobil Oil Corporation in 1960, addressed computerized spectographic analysis. It had many method and apparatus claims that could be performed either on an analog or digital computer, or with pencil and paper. At the time, software was not patentable, so the authors described a non-computer method of choosing the temperatures, using matrix inversion.  However, the description in the patent application used linear algebra notation similar to that of textbooks published late in the 19^th century to disguise the more obvious matrix notation that was invented much later. (adapted from Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 4.2, and Digital Document Quarterly 7.3, accessed 01-01-2009).

"A Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) decision is famous because the question "whether computer programs could contain patentable subject matter" was also before the CCPA.  See Application of Charles D. Prater and James Wei, U.S. CCPA, 415 F.2d 1378, November 20, 1968." (Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 7,3, accessed 01-01-2009).

J. C. R. Licklider publishes Man-Computer Symbiosis, postulating that the computer should become an intimate symbiotic partner in human activity, including communication. (See Reading 10.5.)

The first report on COBOL is published.

The first symposium on bionics (biological electronics) takes place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (See Reading 11.7.)

C. Breen and D. A. Dahlbaum publish "Signaling Systems for the Control of Telephone Switching," Bell System Technical Journal, 39 (1960) 1381-1444.

"Telephone signaling is basically a matter of transferring information between machines, and between humans and machines. The techniques developed to accomplish this have evolved over the years in step with advances in the total telephone art. The history of this evolution is traced, starting from the early simple manual switchboard days to the present Direct Distance Dialing era. The effect of the increasing sophistication in automatic switching and transmission systems and their influence on signaling principles are discussed. Emphasis is given to the signaling systems used between central offices of the nationwide telephone network and the influence on such systems of the characteristics of switching systems and their information requirements, the transmission media and the compatibility problem. A review is made of the forms and characteristics of some of the interoffice signaling systems presently in use. In addition, the problem of signaling between Bell System and overseas telephone systems is reviewed with reference to delivering information requirements, signaling techniques and new transmission media. Finally, some speculation is made on the future trends of telephone signaling systems" (abstract of the paper).

According to http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs.php, the Breen and Dahlbaum paper is

"often cited as the article that gave away the keys to the kingdom," leading to the development of the underground "phreaker" culture.  Other papers that included the in-band trunk signaling tones which provided the technical information needed to build Blue Boxes are cited at http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/bstj.html, accessed 09-17-2009).

My thanks to Jeffrey Odel for this reference.

On December 6 and 7 essentially the same COBOL program was run on two different makes of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating for the first time that compatibility between computers produced by different manufacturers could be achieved.

British science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke publishes a short story entitled "Dial F for Frankenstein.

". . . it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems" (John Markoff, "The Coming Superbrain," New York Times, May 24, 2009).

"The father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee credits Clarke's short story, Dial F for Frankenstein, as an inspiration" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-turns-to-fact-799519.html, accessed 05-24-2009).

QUOTRON, a computerized stock-quotation system using a Control Data Corporation computer, is introduced.

Quotron became popular with stockbrokers, signaling the end of traditional ticker tape.

Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner and colleagues propose that DNA code is written in “words” called codons formed of three DNA bases. DNA sequence is built from four different bases, so a total of 64 (4 x 4 x 4) possible codons can be produced.

They also proposed that a particular set of RNA molecules subsequently called transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act to “decode” the DNA.

Francis Crick, L. Barnett, Sydney. Brenner and R. J. Watts-Tobin, “General Nature of the Genetic code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (1961): 122732.

“There was an unfortunate thing at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium that year. I said, ‘We call this messenger RNA’ Because Mercury was the messenger of the gods, you know. And Erwin Chargaff very quickly stood up in the audience and said he wished to point out that Mercury may have been the messenger of the gods, but he was also the god of thieves. Which said a lot for Chargaff at the time! But I don’t think that we stole anything from anybody--except from nature. I think it’s right to steal from nature, however” (Brenner, My Life, 85).

Edward Zajak at Bell Labs produces the first computer-animated film, entitled Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System.

Over seven thousand people belong to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Compugraphic engineers recognize that a computer can be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically.

The firm developed a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminated all operator decisions and produced a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

Fernando J. Corbató and team at MIT develop one of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System.)

CTSS had one of the first computerized text formatting utilities, called RUNOFF, the precursor of word processing, and one of the first inter-user messaging implementations, presaging instant messaging and electronic mail.

Mathematician and founder of Stanford University's Computer Science department, George E. Forsythe coins the term "computer science" in his paper "Engineering Students Must Learn both Computing and Mathematics", J. Eng. Educ. 52 (1961) 177-188, quotation from p. 177:

"In 1961 we find him using the term 'computer science' for the first time in his writing:

[Computers] are developing so rapidly that even computer scientists cannot keep up with them. It must be bewildering to most mathematicians and engineers...In spite of the diversity of the applications, the methods of attacking the difficult problems with computers show a great unity, and the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges. It must be understood, however, that this is still a young field whose structure is still nebulous. The student will find a great many more problems than answers. 

"He identified the "computer sciences" as the theory of programming, numerical analysis, data processing, and the design of computer systems, and observed that the latter three were better understood than the theory of programming, and more available in courses" (Knuth, "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science," Communications of the ACM, 15 (1972) 722).

Wesley A. Clark, a computer scientist at MIT, starts building the Linc (Laboratory instrument computer).

The machine, which some later called both the first mini-computer and a forerunner of  the personal computer, was first used in 1962. It had small table-top size, “low cost” ($43,000), keyboard and display, file system and an interactive operating system. It's design was placed in the public domain. Eventually fifty of the machines were sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Leonard Kleinrock submits his MIT thesis proposal, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.

Kleinrock's thesis proposal was the first paper on what later came to be known as data communications, or data networking theory. (See Reading 13.2.)

Texas Instruments delivers the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force.

“The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

John W. Haanstra, Chairman, Bob O. Evans, Vice Chairman and others at IBM issue as a confidential internal document Processor Products—Final Report of SPREAD Task Group.

In the period from 1952 through 1962, IBM produced seven families of systems—the 140, 1620, 7030 (Stretch), 7040, 7070, 7080, and 7090 groups. They were incompatible with one another, and both users and IBM staff recognized problems caused by this incompatibility. The SPREAD report, as adopted by IBM, led to the development of the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers and peripherals, and essentially reformed the company.

"IBM's public commitment to the SPREAD plan was embodied in the System/360, announced in Poughkeepsie on April 7, 1964. Six machines were announced: the 360 Model 30, 40, 50, 60, 62 and 70. Over the next few years, a number of additional systems were added to the 360 family.

"The SPREAD plan eventually allowed IBM to direct substantial resources toward the development of the full system—peripherals, programming, communications, and new applications. The success of System/360 is perhaps best measured by IBM's financial performance. In the six years from January 1, 1966 to December 31, 1971, IBM's gross income increased 2.3 times, from $3.6 billion to $8.3 billion, and net earnings after taxes increrased 2.3 times, from $477 million to $1.1 billion. In 1982 direct descendants of System/360 accounted for more than half of IBM's gross income and earnings.

"Perhaps most important, the SPREAD Report permitted IBM to focus on an excellence not possible with multiple architectures. It resulted in powerful new peripherals, programming, terminals, high-volume applications, and complementary diversifications whose future can only be imagined" (Bob O. Evans, "Introduction to SPREAD Report," Annals of the History of Computing 5 [1983] 5).  The text of the report was reprinted in the same journal issue on pp. 6-26.

Nearly all copies of this confidential report were destroyed. An original copy, donated by one of the authors, Jerome Svigals, is preserved in the Computer History Museum.

Programmer and computer scientist Steve Russell, aka Steve "Slug" Russell, and his team at MIT, including members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, take about 200 hours to program the first computer game for a commercially available computer on a DEC PDP-1.

Inspired by the space battles in the Lensman serial of science fiction space opera by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the computer game, or videogame, was called Spacewar .

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.

This very carefully documented book convincingly proved the disastrous effects of DDT in the environment, and generated a storm of controversy. It was later credited with founding the "environmental movement" in the United States.

Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in which he divides history in four epochs: oral tribe culture, manuscript culture, the Gutenberg galaxy and the electronic age.

McLuhan argued that a new communications medium was responsble for the break between each of the four time periods. Writing before computing was pervasive in society, he was concerned with the influence of radio, television and film on print culture, and on the impact of media, independent of content, upon thinking, and social organization:

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ('visual homogenizing of experience'), which in turn impacts social interactions ('fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a. . . specialist outlook'). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of 'segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."

The Los Angeles Times newspaper drives Linotype hot metal typesetters with perforated tape created from RCA computers, greatly speeding up typesetting.

The key to this advance was development of a dictionary and a method to automate hyphenation and justification of text in columns. These tasks had taken 40 percent of a manual Linotype operator's time.

Inforonics develops and maintains "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library."

While working as a consulting scientist at General Electric Company in Syracuse, New York, Nick Holonyak Jr. invents the first visible light-emitting-diode (LED). 

ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, is founded at the University of Michigan. 

ICPSR became the world's largest archive of digital social science data,  acquiring, preserving, and distributing original research data, and providing training in its analysis.

Leonard Kleinrock publishes "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" in RLE Quarterly Progress Reports. This was the first publication to describe and analyze an algorithm for chopping messages into smaller pieces, later to be known as packets. Kleinrock's MIT doctoral thesis, Message Delay in Communication Nets with Storage, filed in December 1962, elaborated on the impact of this algorithm on data networks. (See Reading 13.3.)

J.C.R. Licklider and Welden E. Clark publish “Online Man-Computer Communication,” calling for time-sharing of computers, for graphic displays of information, and the need for an improved graphical interface. (See Reading 10.6.)

A Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral launches the AT&T TELSTAR 1 satellite. It was the first privately owned active communications satellite,  transmitting the first direct television pictures from the United States to Europe. It became the first satellite to relay signals from the earth to a satellite and back.

A bug in the flight software for the Mariner I space probe causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean.

"The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory."

In 2005 Wired Magazine characterized this bug as the first of the "ten greatest software bugs of all time."

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute completes his report, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, for the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

J.C. R. Licklider is appointed Director of the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Licklider's  initial budget was $10,000,000 per year. Licklider eventually initiated the sequence of events leading to ARPANET.

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors and IBM, which began development in 1959. This was the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard is promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

"Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text and space is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8" (Wikipedia article on ASCII, accessed 01-29-2010).

Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-5, DEC’s first 12 bit computer.

This was later called “the world’s first commercially produced mini computer.” The PDP-8 introduced in 1965 was also given this designation.

Allen M. Cormack shows that changes in tissue density can be computed from x-ray data.

No machine was constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power. This discovery led in 1972 to the invention of computed tomography (CT).

Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, creates the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. (See Reading 10.7.)

Compugraphic introduces the Linasec I and II, the first general typesetting computers.

These automated tapeprocessors produced justified tapes to drive the Linotype machines used in the newspaper industry.

"The net production of the Linasec-in excess of 3,600 lines per hour compared to the manually-set 600 lines per hour, break open the market by enabling newspapers to carry more detailed, late breaking news stories."

J.C.R. Licklider sends a memo to members and affiliates of what he jokingly calls the "Intergalactic Computer Network, "outlining a key part of his strategy to connect all their individual computers and time-sharing systems into a single computer network spanning the continent.” (Waldrop)

Computer scientist Lawrence G. Roberts publishes Machine Perception of Three Dimensional Solids, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report, TR 315, May 1963. This contained "the first algorithm to eliminate hidden or obscured surfaces from a perspective picture" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

In 1965, Roberts implemented a homogeneous coordinate scheme for transformations and perspective,  publishing Homogenous Matrix Representation and Manipulation of N-Dimensional Constructs, MIT MS-1505. Roberts's "solutions to these problems prompted attempts over the next decade to find faster algorithms for generating hidden surfaces" (Carlson, op. cit.).

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition takes place in London. The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue reads: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963.

This was  followed in 1967 by a cloth-bound edition edition with more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by Nicolas Barker, H.A. Feisenberger, Howard Nixon and S.H. Steinberg.

This exhibition was, and remains, immensely influential on both institutional and private collectors of landmark books that influenced the development of Western Civilization. Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and roughly twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may also record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. The only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues were to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibnitz's stepped-drum calculator. There were references to the invention of radio and films, but not to television. 

The first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2, is launched by NASA on a Delta rocket B booster from Cape Canaveral. "Its orbit was inclined rather than geostationary. . . The satellite successfully kept stationary at the altitude calculated by Herman Potočnik Noordung in the 1920s.

"During Syncom 2's first year, NASA conducted voice, teletype, and facsimile tests, as well as 110 public demonstrations to acquaint people with Syncom's capabilities and invite their feedback. In August 1963, President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., telephoned Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Balewa aboard USNS Kingsport docked in Lagos Harbor; the first live two-way call between heads of state by satellite. The Kingsport acted as a control station and uplink stationa' (Wikipedia article on Syncom, accessed 05-24-2009).

Touch-tone telephone dialing is introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally.

The first use of the term "hacker" in the context of computing appears in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech:

"Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. . . .The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. . . . Because of the 'hacking,' the majority of the MIT phones are 'trapped.' "

Leonard Kleinrock publishes his 1962 PhD thesis in book form as Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay, providing a technology and mathematical theory of data communications. (See Reading 13.4.)

Paul Baran writes On Distributed Communications, describing the use of redundant routing and message blocks to send information across a decentralized network topology.

RCA announces the Spectra series of computers, which can run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, becomes operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) begins using social security numbers as tax ID numbers.

Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny invent BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth.

Systems Development Corporation develops the first computerized encyclopedia.

Eugene Garfield publishes the first Science Citation Index in five printed volumes, indexing 613 journals and 1.4 million citations, using the method of citation analysis.

Two years later Science Citation Index became available on magnetic tape.

William Fetter at Boeing is the first to draw the human body using a computer. He produced the first computer model of a human figure for use in the study of aircraft cockpit design. It was called the “First Man.”

IBM introduces the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invent the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System.

The display was monochrome neon orange and incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels were marketed under the name "Digivue."

Woodbrow W. "Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:

" 'This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc. Some other attempts at facial recognition by machine have allowed for little or no variability in these quantities. Yet the method of correlation (or pattern matching) of unprocessed optical data, which is often used by some researchers, is certain to fail in cases where the variability is great. In particular, the correlation is very low between two pictures of the same person with two different head rotations.'

"This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a GRAFACON, or RAND TABLET, the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

"This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

"After Bledsoe left PRI [Panoramic Research, Inc.] in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, 'It really worked!' " (Faculty Council, University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam Woodrow W. Bledsoe, accessed 05-15-2009).

Bledsoe, W. W. 1964. The Model Method in Facial Recognition, Technical Report PRI 15, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W., and Chan, H. 1965. A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System-Some Preliminary Results, Technical Report PRI 19A, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966a. Man-Machine Facial Recognition: Report on a Large-Scale Experiment, Technical Report PRI 22, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966b. Some Results on Multicategory Patten Recognition. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13(2):304-316.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1968. Semiautomatic Facial Recognition, Technical Report SRI Project 6693, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.

Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan publishes Undertstanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

"In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study — popularly quoted as the medium is the message'. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that 'a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.' More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

"The book is the source of the well-known phrase 'The medium is the message'. It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists" (Wikipedia article on Understanding Media, accessed 11-14-2009)

American social scientist Bertram Myron Gross coins the expression "information overload" in his book, The Managing of Organizations: the Administrative Struggle.

Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) operational at the National Library of Medicine.

It was the first large scale, computer-based, retrospective search service available to the general public.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly receive patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC, a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charged a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduces the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit--a hearing aid.

American mathematician and researcher in artificial intelligence Ray Solomonoff publishes "A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference, Part I" Information and Control, 7, No. 1, 1-22,  and  "A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference, Part II," Information and Control, 7, No. 2,  224-254.

This two-art paper is considered the beginning of algorithmic informatiion theory.

Solomonoff first described his results at a Conference at Caltech, 1960, and in a report of February, 1960: "A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference."

IBM announces the System/360 family of compatible machines.  All IBM System/360 products ran the same operating system—OS/360. Previously products developed by different divisions of IBM were incompatible.

IBM System/360 products were the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that were offered at what was considered a “reasonable price.” Their architecture incorporated Microprogramming.

The Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army issues in Beijing or Tianjin Mao Zedong, Mao Zhu XI Yu Lu (Quotations of Chairman Mao.) This "probably still holds the world record for most copies printed of a single work in under four years (720 million books by the end of 1967)."

M. R. Davis and T. O. Ellis of The Rand Corporation publish The RAND Tablet: A Machine Graphical Communication Device. They indicate that the device had been in use since 1963.

"The RAND table is believed to be the first such graphic device that is digital, is relatively low-cost, possesses excellent linearity, and is able to uniquely describe 10 [to the 6th power] locations in the 10" x 10" active table area. . . . the tablet has great potential no only in such applications as digitizing map information, but also as a working tool in the study of more esoteric applications of graphical languages for man-machine interaction. . . . " (p.iv)

"The RAND tablet device generates 10-bit x and 10-bit y stylus position information. It is connected to an input channel of a general-purpose computer and also to an oscilloscope display. The display control multiplexes the stylus position information with computer-generated information in such a way that the oscilloscope display contains a composite of the current pen position (represented as a dot) and the computer output. In addition, the computer may regenerate meaningful track history on the CRT, so that while the user is writing, it appears that the pen has "ink." This displayed "ink" is visualized from the oscilloscope display while hand-directing the stylus position on the tablet. users normally adjust within a few minutes to the conceptual superposition of the displayed ink and the actual off-screen pen movement. There is no apparent loss of ease or speed in writing, printing, constructing arbitrary figures, or even in penning one's signature" (pp. 2-3).

J. W. Ward, History of Pen Computing: Annotated Bibliography in On-line Character Recognition and Pen Computing: http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/pens/biblio70.html#DavisMR64 , accessed 12-30-2009).

The first geostationary communication satellite, Syncom 3, is launched by NASA with a Delta D #25 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral.

"The satellite, in orbit near the International Date Line, was used to telecast the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to the United States. It was the first television program to cross the Pacific ocean" (Wikipedia article on Syncom, accessed 05-24-2009).

Robert Moog creates the first substractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller, and demonstrates it at the at the Audio Engineering Society convention.

The Moog synthesizer became one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. It is a member of the quintephone family of musical instruments, which generate sounds "informatically."

The Homestead Meeting between J.C.R. Licklider and Lawrence G. Roberts sparks Roberts to undertake the creation of the ARPANET.

Computer scientist Jerome H. Salzer writes TYPESET and RUNOFF, memorandum editor and type-out commmands.

RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use. It's formatting commands derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents.

"It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor). RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification (TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities).

"RUNOFF is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics, which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix, and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360, and of course indirectly for every computerized word processing system.

"Likewise, RUNOFF for CTSS was the predecessor of the various RUNOFFs for DEC's operating systems, via the RUNOFF developed by the University of California, Berkeley's Project Genie for the SDS 940 system.

"The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a copy" (Wikipedia article on TYPESET and RUNOFF, accessed 01-31-2010).

DEC introduces the PDP-8, the first “production model minicomputer.” “Small in physical size, selling in minimum configuration for under $20,000.”

William Fetter publishes the first book on computer graphics: Computer Graphics in Communication. Fetter coined the term “computer graphics” in 1960.

J.C.R. Licklider publishes Libraries of the Future, a study of what libraries may be at the end of the twentieth century.

Licklider's book reviewed systems for information storage, organization, and retrieval, use of computers in libraries, and library question-answering systems. In his discussion he was probably the first to raise general questions concerning the transition of the book from exclusively printing on paper to electronic form.

Honeywell attempts to open the home computer market with its Kitchen Computer.

The H316 was the first under-$10,000 16-bit machine from a major computer manufacturer. It was the smallest addition to the Honeywell "Series 16" line, and was available in three versions: table-top, rack-mountable, and self-standing pedestal. The pedestal version, complete with cutting board, was marketed by Neimann Marcus as "The Kitchen Computer.” It came with some built-in recipes, two weeks' worth of programming, a cook book, and an apron.

There is no evidence that any examples were sold.

Though its exact history is murky, email begins as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate. Among the first systems to have this facility were System Development Corporation (SDC) (Q32) and MIT (CTSS).

Hearings are held by the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy by computers.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson publishes "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM Annual Conference/Annual Meeting archive Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

The U. S. Postal Sevice introduces OCR software to sort mail.

Charles K. Kao and George A. Hockham of the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC)  promote the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers may be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication.

Kao and Hockham proposed that the attenuation in fibers available at the time was caused by impurities, which could be removed, rather than by fundamental physical effects such as scattering. Later fiber optic communication became the technology enabling the Internet backbone.

In 2009 Charles Kao received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." A more detailed account of Kao's work, placing it in historical perspective, was prepared by the Nobel Prize Committee and may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

Paul Tenczar develops the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors." This also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons— that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

The first documentation of the TUTOR language, under this name, appears to be The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, January 1969.

Programmer and systems analyst Henriette Avram completes the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) Pilot Project, creating the foundation for the national and international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries. The MARC standards consist of the MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. . . . Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs.

Irving John Good, originally named Isidore Jacob Gudak, publishes "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine," Advances in Computers, vol. 6 (1965) 31ff.

This paper originated the concept later known as "technological singularity," which anticipates the eventual existence of superhuman intelligence:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." 

Stanley Kubrick consulted Good regarding aspects of computing and artificial intelligence when filming 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of whose principal characters was the paranoid HAL 9000 supercomputer.

2001 is noticed in this database.

Theodore R. Schellenberg publishes The Management of Archives.

Philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist John Alan Robinson publishes "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle", Communications of the ACM, 5:23–41.

This paper introduced the resolution principle, a standard of logical deduction in AI applications.

James Cooley and John Tukey publish the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm .

Maurice Wilkes introduces memory caching.

Gordon Moore observes the exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicts that this trend will continue. The press calls this “Moore’s Law.” (See Reading 8.10.)

Lawrence Roberts does the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 to System Development Corporation's Q32.

This was the first time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets were used to communicate between computers.

The New York Stock Exchange completes automation of its basic trading functions.

Semiconductor memory begins to replace magnetic-core memory.

The IRS completes computerization of income-tax processing, with a central facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and satellite locations around the United States.

Robert H. Dennard of IBM invents Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) cells— one-transistor memory cells that store each single bit of information as an electrical charge in an electronic circuit. The technology permitted major increases in memory density.

Aaron Klug formulates a method for digital image processing of two-dimensional images.

A. Klug and D. J. de Rosier, “Optical filtering of electron micrographs: Reconstruction of one-sided images,” Nature 212 (1966): 2932.

Stephen B. Gray, computers editor for Electronics magazine, founds The Amateur Computer Society, possibly the first personal computer club.

Richard Gering's Data Corporation contracts with the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer-assisted, full-text system to keep track of procurement contracts and equipment inventory.

Roger K. Summit has the DIALOG online information retrieval system operational for Lockheed Aircraft.

The Second Vatican Council under Pope Paul VI abolishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, founded in 1557.

Using the Project MAC, an early time-sharing system at MIT, Cyrus Levinthal builds the first system for the interactive display of molecular structures. 

"This program allowed the study of short-range interaction between atoms and the "online manipulation" of molecular structures. The display terminal (nicknamed Kluge) was a monochrome oscilloscope (figures 1 and 2), showing the structures in wireframe fashion (figures 3 and 4). Three-dimensional effect was achieved by having the structure rotate constantly on the screen. To compensate for any ambiguity as to the actual sense of the rotation, the rate of rotation could be controlled by globe-shaped device on which the user rested his/her hand (an ancestor of today's trackball). Technical details of this system were published in 1968 (Levinthal et al.). What could be the full potential of such a set-up was not completely settled at the time, but there was no doubt that it was paving the way for the future. Thus, this is the conclusion of Cyrus Levinthal's description of the system in Scientific American (p. 52):

It is too early to evaluate the usefulness of the man-computer combination in solving real problems of molecular biology. It does seems likely, however, that only with this combination can the investigator use his "chemical insight" in an effective way. We already know that we can use the computer to build and display models of large molecules and that this procedure can be very useful in helping us to understand how such molecules function. But it may still be a few years before we have learned just how useful it is for the investigator to be able to interact with the computer while the molecular model is being constructed.

"Shortly before his death in 1990, Cyrus Levinthal penned a short biographical account of his early work in molecular graphics. The text of this account can be found here."

You can watch a six minute film produced with the interactive molecular graphics and modeling system devised by Cyrus Levinthal and his collaborators in the mid-1960s at this link.

American showman, songwriter, and artist Bobb Goldsteinn (Bob Goldstein) coins the term multimedia to promote the July 1966 opening of his "LightWorks at L'Oursin" show at Southampton, Long Island. "On August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino of Variety borrowed the terminology, reporting: 'Brainchild of songscribe-comic Bob (‘Washington Square’) Goldstein, the ‘Lightworks’ is the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discothèque fare' " (Wikipedia article on Multimedia, accessed 08-29-2010).

The evolving concept of multimedia involves combinations of text, still images, video, animation, sound, and interactivity. Thus, technically an illustrated book could be considered a multimedia object with a combination of texts and images; however, multimedia primarily implies combinations of electronic media.

Lawrence Roberts writes Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers, describing networking research at MIT.

Lawrence Roberts becomes ARPA IPTO (Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Processing Technology Office) Chief Scientist and begins the design of the ARPANET. The ARPANET program as proposed to Congress by Roberts  explored computer resource sharing and packet switching communications to ensure reliability.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies.

This was an experiment in packet switching.

Data Corporation contracts with the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation to create a full-text, interactive research service for Ohio statutes.

Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborate on the first hypertext editing system, based on Nelson's concept of hypertext.

They developed the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

The colleges and universities in the state of Ohio found the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions can share resources and reduce costs.

After the bibliographical database expanded far beyond the state of Ohio it was renamed Online Computer Library Center, retaining the same initials.

Texas Instruments files the patent for the first hand-held electronic calculator, invented by Jack S. Kilby, Jerry Merryman, and Jim Van Tassel. The patent (Number 3,819,921) was awarded on June 25, 1974.

This miniature calculator employed a large-scale integrated semiconductor array containing the equivalent of thousands of discrete semiconductor devices.

Directors of fifteen New York-area museums form the Museum Computer Network to create a prototype system for a shared museum data-bank.

The project recruited curators and registrars to develop a data dictionary that  accommodated the diverse methods used to describe museum collections. The resulting tagged record format allowed for the description of individual objects with separate records for artist biographical information and reference citations. Jack Heller's GRIPHOS (General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies) system provided the information storage, search, and retrieval infrastructures for the records.

American ecologist Robert McArthur and American biologist E. O. Wilson publish The Theory of Island Biogeography. In this work they showed that the species richness of an area could be predicted in terms of such factors as habitat area, immigration rate and extinction rate.

"Island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species richness of natural communities. The theory was developed to explain species richness of actual islands. It has since been extended to mountains surrounded by deserts, lakes surrounded by dry land, forest fragments surrounded by human-altered landscapes. Now it is used in reference to any ecosystem surrounded by unlike ecosystems. The field was started in the 1960s by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson, who coined the term theory of island biogeography, as this theory attempted to predict the number of species that would exist on a newly created island.

"For biogeographical purposes, an 'island' is any area of suitable habitat surrounded by an expanse of unsuitable habitat. While this may be a traditional island—a mass of land surrounded by water—the term may also be applied to many untraditional 'islands', such as the peaks of mountains, isolated springs in the desert, or expanses of grassland surrounded by highways or housing tracts. Additionally, what is an island for one organism may not be an island for another: some organisms located on mountaintops may also be found in the valleys, while others may be restricted to the peaks" (Wikipedia article on Island biogeography, accessed 05-08-2009).

Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman Andrew Viterbi develops the Viterbi algorithm,  "as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, finding universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is now also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. For example, in speech-to-text (speech recognition), the acoustic signal is treated as the observed sequence of events, and a string of text is considered to be the "hidden cause" of the acoustic signal. The Viterbi algorithm finds the most likely string of text given the acoustic signal" (Wikipedia article on Viterbi algorithm, accessed 12-29-2009).

Henry Kucera (born Jindřich Kučera) and Nelson Francis publish Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English.

A founding work on corpus linguistics, this book "provided basic statistics on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus. The Brown Corpus was a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totaling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, psychology, statistics, and sociology" (Wikipedia article on Brown Corpus, accessed 06-07-2010)./

The United States Senate holds hearings on computer privacy.

At the ARPANET Design Session held by Lawrence Roberts at the ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Wesley Clark suggests the use of mini-computers for network packet switches instead of using the main frame computers on the Arpanet for switching.

These machines were called Interface Message Processors.

The Department of Defense requests the Director of the Advanced Research Planning Agency (ARPA) to form a Task Force “to study and recommend hardware and software safeguards that would satisfactorily protect classified information in multi-access, resource-sharing computer systems.” Their report was published in 1970.

Professor of mechanical engineering and researcher in interactive computer graphics at MIT's Electronic Systems Laboratory Steven A. Coons publishes Surfaces for Computer-aided Design of Space Forms, Project MAC Report MAC-TR-41, MIT.

Known as the "The Little Red Book,

" the paper described what became known as the "Coons Patch"— "a formulation that presented the notation, mathematical foundation, and intuitive interpretation of an idea that would ultimately become the foundation for surface descriptions that are commonly used today, such as b-spline surfaces, NURB surfaces, etc. His technique for describing a surface was to construct it out of collections of adjacent patches, which had continuity constraints that would allow surfaces to have curvature which was expected by the designer. Each patch was defined by four boundary curves, and a set of "blending functions" that defined how the interior was constructed out of interpolated values of the boundaries" (Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, accessed 05-30-2009).

Douglas C. Engelbart files a patent for an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. This device will become known as The Mouse.

Donald Davies introduces the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper called “A Digital Communications Network for Computers.”

Lawrence Roberts publishes the first paper on the design of the ARPANET: “Multiple computer networks and intercomputer communication.” (See Reading 13.5)

J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor publish The Computer as a Communication Device in which they describe features of the future ARPANET. (See Reading 13.6.)

Mead Corporation purchases Data Corporation.

Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, creates the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head mounted display system.

Sutherland's head mounted display was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the formidable appearance of the device inspired its name—the Sword of Damocles. The system was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe rooms.

Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, both professors at the University of Utah, found Evans & Sutherland to commercialize the use of computers as simulators for training purposes.

Hewlett Packard introduces the desk calculator, HP 9100A.

Mansell begins publication of The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: a Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by other American Libraries. One of the largest sets of printed volumes ever published,  and most probably the largest printed bibliography, it was completed in 1981 in 754 folio volumes, containing a total of over 12,000,000 entries on 528,000 pages.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by American film director Stanley Kubrick in collaboration with science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, captures imaginations with the idea of a computer that can see, speak, hear, and “think.” 

Perhaps the star of the film was the HAL 9000 computer. "HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that can be seen throughout the Discovery spaceship. . . . HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition, facial recognition, and natural language processing, but also lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions, reasoning, and chess, in addition to maintaining all systems on an interplanetary voyage.

"HAL is never visualized as a single entity. He is, however, portrayed with a soft voice and a conversational manner. This is in contrast to the human astronauts, who speak in terse monotone, as do all other actors in the film" (Wikipedia article on HAL 9000, accessed 05-24-2009).

"Kubrick and Clarke had met in New York City in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. As the idea developed, it was decided that the story for the film was to be loosely based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short story competition. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but Kubrick suggested during one of their brainstorming meetings that before beginning on the actual script, they should let their imaginations soar free by writing a novel first, which the film would be based on upon its completion. 'This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. Thus I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes -- a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors can have enjoyed.' The novel ended up being published a few months after the release of the movie" (Wikipedia article on Arthur C. Clarke, accessed 05-24-2009).

Philip K. Dick publishes his science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It tells of the moral crisis of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who stalks androids—robots visually identifical to people—in a fall-out clouded, dystopic, partially deserted San Francisco.

In 1982 the novel was brought to the screen as Blade Runner, with its location changed to Los Angeles. The film is noticed in this database.

IBM adopts a new marketing policy that charges separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This “unbundling” will give rise to the software and services industry.

K. G. Pontius Hultén publishes The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, the catalogue of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This was a landmark exhibition on the history of the machine in its relationship to art from the Renaissance to 1968; or as the editor stated, it was "a collection of comments on technology by artists of the Western world" (p.3). The art reproduced and described in the catalogue— including much that was radical for its time—was mainly in traditional media such as prints or paintings, sculptural or mechanical, with a few electro-mechanical items, and one example of laser art. Only the last two items in the exhibition were examples of computer graphics, the first of which was a trite reclining nude executed on what appears to be a dot matrix printer by the artist, Leon D. Harman.

The design and production of the catalogue was unusually excellent, including a very striking binding of aluminum sheeting with a stamped enamel-painted design of the MOMA building on the upper cover.

German electrical engineers Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff invent the smart card (chip card, or integrated circuit card [ICC]) and apply for the patent. The patent for the smart card was finally granted to both inventors in 1982. The first wide use of the cards was for payment in French pay phones—France Telecom Télécarte—starting in 1983-84.

Aaron Klug describes techniques for the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures from electron micrographs, thus founding the processing of three-dimensional digital images.

D. J. de Rosier and A. Klug, “Reconstruction of three dimensional structures from electron micrographs,” Nature 217 (1968) 13034.

The Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organize the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove found Intel.

The company was originally incorporated under the name of NM Electronics.

Jasia Reichardt publishes Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, based on an exhibition in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

This was the first serious exhibition of computer art.

"It drew together 325 participants from many countries; attendance figures reached somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 (accounts differ) and it received wide and generally positive press coverage ranging from the Daily Mirror newspaper to the fashion magazine Vogue. A scaled-down version toured to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and then the Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. It took Reichardt three years of fundraising, travelling and planning" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-80 [2008] 101-102)

"The computer is only a tool which, at the moment, still seems far removed from those polemic preoccupations which concern modern art. However, even now seen with all the prejudices of tradition and time, one cannot deny that the computer demonstrates a radical extension in art media and techniques. The possibilities inherent in the computer as a creative tool will do little to change those idioms of art, which rely primarily on the dialogue between the artist, his ideas, and the canvas. They will, however, increase the scope of art and contribute to its intensity" (Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity).

The term “software engineering” is coined at a NATO conference, in response to the perception that computer programming has not kept up with advances in computer hardware.

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute demonstrates at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which include hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart uses the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

The first manned Apollo flights occur, including Apollo 8, which circumnavigates the moon on Christmas Eve.

Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs.

This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.

In this year 32,393 books are produced in the United Kingdom.

Compuserve is founded as a way to generate income from Golden United mainframe computers during non-business hours.

Comcast became the first commercial online service in the United States.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is founded as the successor to National Educational Television (NET).

Working at Bell Labs, Willard Boyle and George E. Smith invent the charge-coupled device (CCD), a sensor for recording images.

In 2009 Boyle and Smith shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." The Nobel Prize Committee prepared a report putting the discovery of the CCD in perspective. It may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

"The lab [Bell Labs] was working on the picture phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. As the CCD started its life as a memory device, one could only "inject" charge into the device at an input register. However, it was immediately clear that the CCD could receive charge via the photoelectric effect and electronic images could be created. By 1969, Bell researchers were able to capture images with simple linear devices; thus the CCD was born. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. Fairchild was the first with commercial devices and by 1974 had a linear 500 element device and a 2-D 100 x 100 pixel device. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a big development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass produce CCDs for their camcorders. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982. Subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution" (Wikipedia article on Charge-coupled device, accessed 10-06-2009).

IBM introduces the Generalized Markup Language, GML, developed by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, whose surname initials were used by Goldfarb to make up the term GML. 

GML was "a set of macros that implemented intent-based markup tags for the IBM text formatter, "'SCRIPT.' SCRIPT was the main component of IBM's Document Composition Facility (DCF). A starter set of tags in GML was provided with the DCF product.

"GML simplifies the description of a document in terms of its format, organization structure, content parts and their relationship, and other properties. GML markup (or tags) describes such parts as chapters, important sections, and less important sections (by specifying heading levels), paragraphs, lists, tables, and so forth." (Wikipedia article on IBM Generalized Markup Language, accessed 12-21-2008).

Engineer and computer designer Konrad Zuse publishes Rechnender Raum. This was translated into English in 1970 under the title, Calculating Space. It was the first book on digital physics.

"Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed in real time on some sort of cellular automata or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.

"Bell's theorem is sometimes thought to contradict Zuse's hypothesis, but it is not applicable to deterministic universes, as Bell himself pointed out. Similarly, while Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits in a fundamental way what an observer can observe, when the observer is himself a part of the universe he is trying to observe, that principle does not rule out Zuse's hypothesis, which views any observer as a part of the hypothesized deterministic process. So far there is no unambiguous physical evidence against the possibility that "everything is just a computation," and a fair bit has been written about digital physics since Zuse's book appeared" (Wikipedia article on Calculating Space, accessed 05-16-2009).

"The first digital sampler was the EMS(Electronic Music Studios) Musys system developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio c. 1969. The system ran on two mini-computers, a pair of Digital Equipment’s PDP-8s. These had the tiny memory of 12,000 (12k) bytes, backed up by a hard drive of 32k and by tape storage (DecTape)—all of this absolutely minuscule by today’s standards. Nevertheless, the EMS equipment was used as the world’s first music sampler and the computers were used to control the world's first digital studio" (Wikipedia article on Sampler (musical instrument), with hyperlinks that I added, accessed 08-29-2009).

Houghton Mifflin publishes The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

"The AHD broke ground among dictionaries by using corpus linguistics for compiling word-frequencies and other information. It took the innovative step of combining prescriptive information (how language should be used) and descriptive information (how it actually is used). The descriptive information was derived from actual texts. Citations were based on a million-word, three-line citation database[the Brown Corpus] prepared by Brown University linguist Henry Kucera" (Wikipedia article on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, accessed 06-07-2010).

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodies peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others from Fairchild Semiconductor. It began operations as a producer of logic chips.

Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, lunar module pilot, become the first human beings to walk on the moon.

Their landing was almost canceled in the final seconds because of an overload of the Apollo Guidance Computer’s memory, but on advice from Earth, they ignored the warnings and landed safely. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first recognizably modern embedded system used in real-time by astronaut pilots.

The first ARPANET node is installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center.

Leonard Kleinrock established the first network connection between a network packet switch called an Interface Message Processor , ancestor of today's routers, and a time-shared host computer. (See Reading 13.7.)

The first message is sent over the ARPANET from Leonard Kleinrock’s UCLA computer to the second node at Stanford Research Institute’s computer.

The message was simply “Lo.”